The New Prohibition

Step a-side, global warming!  There's a new panic in town that tells us that we will all die horrible deaths long before the polar ice caps melt and flood New York City.  US Surgeon General Richard Carmona (long-time anti-smoking advocate) declared, in a long-winded and bloated report, that second-hand smoke is the new evil crisis facing America. 

What the report comes down to, it seems, is that we more or less have to bulldoze any building that people have ever smoked in.  According to Newsday, "even brief exposure, doctors say, can cause immediate harm."  A press release from Nymox states that the Surgeon General's report "notes that even a brief exposure to second-hand smoke has immediate adverse effects on a person's cardiovascular system."

I'm getting the impression that non-smokers out there might be better off just smoking!

When I hear Al Gore from atop his mighty environmental perch, I want to smoke a cigarette.  When I hear that the bird flu is going to kill us all, what the heck!  I smoke a cigarette.

And I have heard that. Oprah Winfrey recently broadcast a scary show, convincing her viewers that a bird flu pandemic was absolutely inevitable and not far off and tens of millions of us were going to die.  And there isn't a damn thing we can do about it.  And we're supposed to care about second-hand smoke?   Of course this was the same Oprah, who in 1987, warned the nation that some 40 million heterosexuals were going to have AIDS by 1990.  Oops...

So assuming we survive all of Oprahdamus' predictions here, we still have to deal with that nasty tobacco habit that some silly Americans just feel entitled to.  What do we do?  What else can we do?  We obviously have to prohibit the sale and usage of tobacco!

I find it interesting that the government collects billions of dollars from tobacco companies through taxes, fees and litigation and then tells us that the mere existence of cigarettes in the world is probably going to harm you, if not kill you.   Isn't it time to shut down Big Tobacco?  In 2003, Carmona told a House subcommittee that he feels there is "no need for any tobacco products in society" and he eagerly supports "banning or abolishing tobacco products."

We're doing all of this through baby steps anyway:  banning smoking in theaters; on airplanes; at airports; in public places; in the workplace; near building entrances; restricting smokers to the corners of restaurants; then, no where in restaurants; no where in bars; in some instances, requiring smoke-free apartment buildings.   Smokers have become todays lepers, being relegated to dreaded 'back-alley' smoking.  Summaries of this report show that even if no one is smoking around you now, someone may have been smoking here earlier and...bam!  Too late.  You're dead.

I would be curious to know what the left considers worse: tobacco or DDT.

Don't get me wrong.  I think it's appropriate for people to be discouraged from smoking.  As obnoxious as some of the anti-smoking propaganda is, I say more power to organizations like the American Heart & Lung Association for explaining to people the downside of smoking.  What bothers is me is when people try to use the force of law to impose their own distaste upon everyone else.  You'd be hard-pressed to find a hard-core liberal who doesn't support intrusive smoking regulations though most seemingly would oppose governmental interference on most any other vice.  In America, if you and your gay spouse want to snort cocaine off of a prostitutes belly, those are Rights that hundreds of thousands of soldiers have died for...provided you aren't chasing down a Jack & Coke in Bob's Saloon with an evil cigarette!

Perhaps some should remind the left that the temperance assault of the 19th and early 20th centuries is what led to alcohol prohibition.  The temperance movement began as an attempt to encourage and impose moderation on the public and blossomed into the prohibition movement that led to the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, banning the distribution and sale of alcohol.  The reasons were crime and...health.

[WARNING:  parallels ahead!]

Temperance and prohibition advocates supported their stance by promoting a laundry list of health problems caused by alcohol and even created unprovable 'facts' to alarm people of the dangers of alcohol.  One controversial act of alcohol opponents was to cite the dangers that any amount of alcohol could lead one to, particularly for children of parents who drink: "Many men and women are insane because they inherit disordered bodies and minds, caused by the drinking habits of their parents; and the descendants of 'moderate drinkers' differ in this way as well as those of the drunkard....this is called the law of heredity" - propaganda from the Women's Christian Temperance Movement, strong promoters of booze abstinence (as well as opponents of tobacco).  The belief was that even inhaling alcohol vapors might lead to defective offspring through their descendants for at least three generations with problems ranging from insanity and tuberculosis to the 'watering' of the consumers blood.

Following the Civil War, alcohol opponents were successful in getting mandatory "education" on the ills of alcohol spread, including in schools.  School demonstrations included soaking calf's brains in alcohol, noting the change in color of the brain, and then convincing kids that their brains would do the same thing upon their first sip of liquor.  Textbooks would highlight the dangers of alcohol, referring to it as a "poison" that would kill a child or animal upon first drink.

Needless to say, most of this was minimized, denied or debunked by real scientific studies. 

The health aspect was, in fact, supported in a study from 1932 (the tail end of Prohibition) which showed that cases of cirrhosis of the liver were down.  Yet, America rejected the 18th Amendment prohibiting alcohol by ratifying the 21st Amendment in 1933, thus repealing prohibition.  People were pro-choice after all!

Is there a difference between the religious and morality zealots of the Prohibition era and the anti-tobacco zealots of today?  The arguments are similar, the propaganda is similar, the methods of eliminating choice for adults is similar.  Today's selective moralists have been successful in siccing government onto private business owners who may want to allow a legal, adult habit to take place within the walls of their business.  And like the anti-vice fanatics of the early 1900s, todays zealots won't stop at a few victories in their war on vice.  Once tobacco is shunned, they will move on to other big business ventures, like the growing attempts to restrict and punish fast food places for selling people unhealthy food and unhealthy proportions.

The only thing Big Tobacco has going for it is that prohibition of tobacco may actually rob the coffers that the anti-smoking left is so fond of filling.  You may die from minute exposures to second-hand smoke, but don't fret over it if you don't:  there will always be a desire to tax this particular vice through the teeth, which interestingly enough, will probably resist the inevitable urge of some to spearhead yet another failed attempt at prohibiting something legal that other people want.    

tags: anti smoking  prohibition  tobacco  activism  smoking